Why is My Website SO Slow?!: Marketing Q&A

Answering entrepreneurs' most burning marketing questions

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Our CEO Vicky Wu brings her 30 years of experience marketing for Fortune 500 companies, multi-million and multi-billion-dollar global corporations to answer your specific marketing questions. Most entrepreneurs aren’t able to find – or afford – access to this level of expertise. And that’s exactly why we’re bringing it to you.

Entrepreneur Question:

I've been building an eCommerce website in WordPress/Elementor with about 25 products and hosting it in Dreamhost. All image optimizations, caching and CDN have been done yet the site loading time is still slow (10seconds+). Tried upgrading the hosting to VPS yet it's still slow. Dreamhost hosting support is not very helpful. Any leads on how to speed up the site? Any suggestions on hosting providers that can host e-commerce sites well?

Marley

Expert Answer:

I’m going to run a speed audit and a website technical audit. Since I see that your business is in Dubai, I will make sure I run the audits based upon your customer location.

Because you have so few products, you shouldn’t need to upgrade hosting. Before even checking, I know it could be bloated SQL database – one of my client’s sites experienced that recently and they hired me to do some cleanup. WooCommerce has some automated processes that run and can clog up a couple of the database tables. It doesn’t look like you have an excessive number of plugins, so that shouldn’t be an issue. But this audit should provide some more insights.

Vicky

We already did a database optimization using wp-suite. This appears to be what’s causing the slow load time 🥲

Marley

One culprit is likely your currency conversion plugin. I notice that every single page, product, even the consultation pages are all converting to every single currency – and each of those puts multiple entries in the database. This could be a big culprit (I’m still running tests though).

Vicky

Thank you, we’ll try to disable & see if the speed gets better

Marley

Disabling it won’t help, since all of the entries will be in the database. You’d have to disable the plugin, manually remove all of the database entries that it adds, and then test.

Vicky

Ooooh ... So this is probably what's slowing it down. No wonder it didn't speed up even when we upgraded the hosting.

Marley

We tried disabling the multiple currency converter without clearing the database yet and the site’s already gone faster.

We'll be looking for a new plug-in as you suggested. The load time is now 2s

Thank you so much for your advice! It's been so helpful. We've been spending so many sleepless nights on this site. Your help is really greatly appreciated 🙏🏽

Marley

Vicky’s Notes:

Upgrading your hosting plan and paying more won’t always fix the problem if it’s a bloated database. You’d have to REALLY upgrade to a plan that you otherwise don’t need, to notice a speed difference if the problem is a bloated database. This was an example of one of those times that throwing more money at a situation, or even changing website hosting providers, isn’t going to solve a problem.

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Vicky Wu

Vicky is the CEO and Chief Creative Strategist of Vicky Wu Marketing. She draws from 30 years of experience at the CMO level, the CEO level, marketing for Fortune 500 companies and multi-million and multi-billion-dollar organizations, PLUS strategies learned helping startups and nonprofits with limited budgets … now focusing on providing SMBs with effective and efficient marketing strategies – giving them access to the same level of expertise as the really big guys with deep pockets, that they may not otherwise be able to access.